The Secrets of Mary Bowser (48 page)

“And it’s like a sergeant to blather on about someone else’s faults, when his own company has failed in its duties,” Davis answered. “Has anyone discovered how some hundred men happened to slip out of our best guarded prison?”

The private swallowed hard and looked at the floor. “Yes, sir. Shimmied to the cellar through a closed-off chimney, then dug themselves a tunnel fifty feet clear from the building. Popped up past the sentry and just went from there.”

I supposed they’d been digging since Christmas. And the Church Hill lady who smuggled them the tools to do it must have thought it was quite a holiday gift.

“You should shoot every one of those prisoners once they’re found,” Queen Varina said. “To make an example for the others.”

“I shall not,” Davis answered. “Those men are prisoners of war, and anything we do to them, the Union may do to our own men who are held in the North. But residents of the Confederacy are entirely under my control. Any of our citizens who are found to have abetted this escape will immediately be hanged for treason.”

There were even more Public Guard patrols than usual along the streets that evening, searching for escaped prisoners. I hung between buildings and darted across corners as I made my way down to Shockoe Creek and then up Church Hill.

My hands fumbled so at the door to the servants’ entrance of the Van Lew mansion, I nearly started when someone swung it open from inside. “Miss Bet?” I called into the darkened cellar.

“She’s upstairs.” The man who gestured me in was pale and unshaven. His unwashed body stank inside his soiled blue uniform.

“Is that you, Mary?” Bet descended the servants’ stair, launching into a fine speech about all we needed to do to tend the men she was sheltering.

As she railed on, I frowned at the stranger who’d let me in until at last Bet nodded at him to leave us. I waited until he was up the stairs and out of earshot, before I relayed Davis’s execution edict.

Bet’s eyes caught the fire of the candle in her hand. “I have no worries. I shall tell no one of this matter, and the prisoners certainly have no reason to reveal my involvement.”

I wasn’t quite ready to trust whatever score of strangers she had passing through her house, knowing that if one of them were recaptured before reaching the Union lines, he might well be willing to tell a few tales to ease the terms of his confinement. “What about your mother?”

She smiled. “Mother was most agitated when we heard a rumor that Federal soldiers were being hunted in our streets. I suggested a bit of laudanum might ease her mind. I daresay it has, as she took to her bed after dinner and hasn’t so much as murmured since.”

“Drugged or no, if the prisoners are found in her house, she’ll hang as surely as you will.”

A flush of anger, or maybe just of pride, ruddled Bet’s face. “These men have risked death to fight for the Union. Surely our lives are not more dear than theirs.”

My life wasn’t so dear I hadn’t hazarded it since the war began, hazarded it this very hour to warn Bet she was in danger. But danger was like show and ought to her, and she flouted it just as eagerly. And as imprudently.

Her haughtiness with the guard the first day we went to Liggon’s, and her arrogance to the sentry at Howard’s Grove—all that had served me well. But she’d grown so vain about her role in aiding the prisoners, she’d become a dangerment to them, and to herself. To her own mother, even. And to me, if I allowed it.

“I’d best go home,” I said, “so you can tend your visitors.” As I made my way from the mansion, I couldn’t help but wonder if Bet was so defiant because she meant to be caught.

By the next day, the city was abuzz with the news of the prison break. I heard as much talk about the escape on my way home from the Gray House as I did while I was there, the tally of Federals recaptured increasing from one street corner gossipry to the next. Trying not to pay the rumor-mongers much heed, I searched out my parlor window as I came down Broad Street. The shutters were closed tight, though I usually opened them before I went to the Gray House, hoping the sun would warm the empty rooms. Unlatching the door, I smelled the smoke of the hearth fire. But I was certain I hadn’t left so much as an ember still smoldering that morning, wood was in such short supply. Somebody had come in while I was gone, and like the three bears who discover a fox in their bed, I might well find he was still inside.

I had nearly edged back out the door before I heard that sweet-timbred voice humming a spiritual, then singing out the refrain, “O, yes, I want to go home.”

“Wilson Bowser, no more wanting, you’re already here.” I ran up the stairs and into my husband’s arms.

His kiss was like water to someone who’s been wandering in the desert. The loneliness I’d carried during the seven months we’d been apart melted in the warm press of his body against mine.

“Is this really my beautiful wife?” he asked.

“It better be,” I said as we ran our hands over each other, “ ’cause you’d be in a mighty lot of trouble if you tried all this with another woman.” For all the pleasure in our unexpected reunion, still I couldn’t snuff out a flicker of worry. “Is it safe, you coming back here?”

“Those Confederates are so busy looking for Union prisoners, it was easier for me to slip into Richmond today than it was to carry the escaped Federals out to Butler’s lines yesterday. Just be grateful to whoever got all those prisoners out at once, for distracting the Confederates.”

I didn’t bother responding to that. But as I admired my husband’s handsome face, I saw a line or two of worry pinching between his eyes. “What’s troubling you?”

He told me he was just achy from all he’d done the past two days. He put a kettleful of water over the fire, heating himself a bath as he described how he’d ridden cartload after cartload of escaped prisoners from New Kent County out to the Federal troops on the Peninsula.

Once he filled the tub and settled in, I gathered up his soiled clothes, meaning to wash them in the warm water after he was done bathing. I was fretting about where I’d find fabric enough to patch his frock coat, when I felt something stiff in the pocket. I drew out a carte de visite. It showed such a sight, my breath caught deep in my throat.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
. The motto was emblazoned on the state flags that flew all over Richmond, I’d have recognized it even without Miss Douglass’s Latin lessons. But the image beneath the phrase wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen. It was a picture of a colored soldier, wearing the deep blue uniform of the Union. And thrusting his bayonet into a fallen Confederate.

“Wilson, what are you thinking? Carrying an image like this into Secessionist territory can get a negro killed.”

My husband splashed his face. “I don’t suppose it’s any more lethal than spying on Jefferson Davis, or contrabanding escaped slaves or fugitive prisoners.” It wasn’t a joke to set my mind at ease. “Look at the picture. I do believe you’ll know the artist.”

I wasn’t interested in the artist, agitated as I was. But as Wilson stood and took up a cloth to dry himself, sure enough I recognized the hand that created the image, as surely as he’d created the paintings that hung in Mr. Jones’s dining room and Margaretta Forten’s parlor—David Bustill Bowser.

“How did you get a picture of one of your cousin’s paintings?”

“They’re all over Yorktown. It’s the battle flag of the 22d regiment of the United States Colored Troops, and that’s where they’re headquartered.” He paused. “That’s where I’ll be, too, come Monday, when my enlistment takes effect.”

My husband had only just come back to me, and now he wanted to leave. Leave for even more dangerment than we’d yet known. “Running around with incendiary materials isn’t risk enough for you, you need to make good and sure the Confederates are going to be shooting bullets your way?”

“Contrary Mary, can’t you see I’m owning you were right all along? The war is going to bring Emancipation. And every colored man who puts on a uniform is more proof that slavery is ending at last.”

Proof or no, a negro in uniform faced more peril than even the white soldiers who’d been dying all through the war. I reminded him that the Confederates didn’t take colored troops prisoner. They slaughtered them, or they sold them as slaves.

“Then the colored regiments have that much more reason to win.” He nodded at the carte de visite. “This is everything I’ve worked for my whole life. You can’t expect me to just sit through all of it now, not doing my part.”

“You’ve already done plenty. You’ve smuggled my messages out of Richmond, smuggled out Henry Watson and the escaped prisoners, too.”

“Those message are meant to serve the Union army, same as the escaped soldiers will. Hell, even Henry Watson has signed up to fight, though he’s fifty years old or more.” Wilson never was a beseechful man. But this once, there was true entreaty in the way he took me in his arms. “I thought you’d be proud of me for joining up. Like your friend Hattie.”

What did he mean, putting her name in the middle of this? “You don’t even know Hattie.”

“Never met her, that’s so. But I’ve seen a sweet little ambrotype of her, carried at the breast of one Private George Patterson, proudly serving in the 22d USCT.”

“George is out at Yorktown?” I thought of Hattie’s husband and his gapped-tooth smile. I couldn’t imagine him carrying an army rifle.

Wilson nodded. “He’s singing ‘Do You Think I’ll Make a Soldier’, along with the rest of them. From the way he tells it, just about all the boys you went to school with have joined up, except for the most pompous and pretentious of the lot.”

I knew just who he meant by that, though I didn’t let on. I never mentioned my old beau to my beloved husband, though I always relished the difference between them, Wilson as conscientious as Theodore was conceited. But I wasn’t about to remark on that now, as Wilson kept on about how excited he was to be soldiering. “George said he couldn’t wait to write Hattie and tell her Mary had gone and got herself a husband, and he was going to serve beside him.”

Hearing about Hattie and George tugged at my heart, it was true. But this wasn’t some schoolgirl’s lark Wilson was talking about. Battles were leaving bodies so mangled that all the words I knew could not describe them. Virginia had seen such things the year past as made the scene at the Richmond depot after First Manassas seem barely horror at all. “This war already cost me my papa. How should I feel knowing it might take you, too?”

Wilson laid a hand against my face, making a watery-warm impression on my cheek. “You told me how when Hattie’s daddy was attacked, you knew you had to come back to Virginia, whatever the risk. George said Mr. Jones never did recover from that beating, though it took nearly two full years before he passed. When they put out the call in Philadelphia for the 22d, Hattie told George to go fight in her daddy’s memory. Don’t you want me to do the same for yours?”

I ducked my head, unsure. “I don’t know how to be glad about you going off to battle, I just don’t.”

“Maybe you can be proud, even if you aren’t glad.”

I remembered when Mama taught me about pride. She was mighty proud of Papa, and of me, though she wasn’t ever glad we were slaves. Nor glad she had to send me away to a distant, unknown city while she stayed on in Richmond.

I vowed to follow her example, as best I could. “I am mighty proud of you. So you be sure to be brave and smart and careful enough to be worthy of that pride. You come home safe to me, Wilson Bowser, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am, I intend to.” He put his hand across his heart like he was swearing an oath. Then he kissed me with all the passion one person can have for another, reminding me we only had a few days together, and there he was without a stitch of clothing on him.

Later that night, as we lay in the bed, he whispered, “I’m proud of you, too, Mary. For knowing a man needs to fight his own fight sometimes.”

Twenty-three

G
eorge Patterson had his ambrotype of Hattie, and she had the nuptial picture the two of them had sat for years before. Even Wilson marched off carrying the daguerreotype I’d sent Mama and Papa all that time ago. But there was no David Bustill Bowser to take a negro’s image in Richmond. Once my husband’s footfall fell away, all I had left was the empty echo of our rooms. I’d cut the collar from his shirt, hoping for any scent of him, though it was hard to make out even a hint of it over the miasma of sickness and starvation that clung about the city.

February gave way to March, and my back ached along with my heart. I was endlessly scrubbing mud from the Gray House. Mud tracked in on the boots of the military men and politicians who came to see Jeff Davis, then tromped all over the house by the Davis children. Just shy of his seventh birthday, Jeff Junior had been given his own little Confederate uniform for Christmas, and all winter he made a regiment of his younger brothers, marching them about as much as a two-year-old and four-year-old can be marched. Those boys waged ferocious war against the carpets, walls, and windows that Sophronia, Hortense, and I struggled to keep clean.

“What she need with bringing ’nother a them hellcats into the world?” Hortense muttered as we scraped away the latest clods.

“Got to make sure us don’t get a moment’s rest,” I answered.

As long as Queen Varina kept having babies, she got as much attention from her husband as any man struggling under the weight of a foundering government could give. She didn’t tend her own children—even Catherine, the Irish nursemaid, barely bothered with that. So though Queen Varina carped and whined over her condition, she was pleased with being in the family way, her vanity swelling right along with her belly. And though her condition meant more work for those who waited on her, I seized what opportunities it offered to audit Jeff Davis’s conversations.

He stormed into the house the afternoon of the third March without bothering to scrape his boots outside the door. Before I could even take a rag to the trail of footprints he left across the entry hall, he shouted from the library for someone to bring smelling salts.